Once again: anyone got another subreddit where I could be posting these?

BOOKS:

Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris: McCarthy’s final novel to be published is a companion piece, if you didn’t already know, to The Passenger, the other novel he published in 2022; the heroine of Stella is the sister of the protagonist of The Passenger, and they had sexual feelings for each other. I don’t know which one you’re really supposed to read first and I guess it ultimately didn’t matter. Southern Gothic? Western? Violence, death, nihilism? Nope–Cormac’s last book is under 200 pages long, features his first real female protagonist (damn near his first real female character, really) and consists exclusively of dialogue, with the heroine conversing with a psychiatrist and talking about various subjects–science, math (she’s a math genius, actually), Oppenheimer, death, love, yada yada yada. It’s Cormac’s Waking Life, people!! It’s the closest he’s ever come to “quirky”–I’m not even kidding!! (Most reviews of this that I read just got stuck in the idea of Cormac writing a female protagonist.) I think it’s just a decent book, though, with about a little over half of the conversations being all that engaging, and since I don’t expect any writer, even my favorite writer, to just write piles and piles of awesome, I guess that means I should just be grateful that Cormac didn’t end on the sour note of The Counselor.

TELEVISION:

Mike Judge’s Beavis And Butt-Head (season 2): This slowly grew on me until it became the best season I’ve yet seen of B&B, which means it’s a little better than “okay.” I don’t know that I’d really be able to tell you why I liked this more than usual, though I will state the funniest episode was the last one, which commented on parents today being too permissive and forgiving of their kid’s faults by having Beavis whip out his Cornholio routine in his best friend’s house. The gags the show has beaten to death seemed a little less in abundance than usual, though Judge still hasn’t gotten any real humor out of “Smart Beavis” and “Smart Butt-Head” and the comments on Youtube clips aren’t that funny. If they made a third season of this, I’d go ahead and watch.

MOVIES:

Mister Organ: A documentary. A New Zealand journalist finds out about a rich woman and a guy who “works” for her by the name of of Michael Organ, who pulls a scam tricking people out of their money in a parking lot. The journalist’s attempts to find out more about Mr. Organ result in Mr. Organ somehow getting a key to the journalist’s home and trying to invade his life, or at least that’s what this rather puffed-up little film wants you to believe–that Mr. Organ is one of the most dangerous narcissists you could possibly not want to meet, and that said narcissism gives him almost God-like powers to screw with you and ruin your life. Beware, beware!! I didn’t much buy it, though Mr. Organ IS a messed-up person. I’m going to watch another NZ-OZ documentary, Last Stop Larrimah, which I hope is better than this critically overrated mediocrity.

Judas And The Black Messiah: William O’Neal, the guy who more or less got Black Panther Fred Hampton killed, was one sorry son of a gun, and this movie is pretty damn depressing to watch on any number of levels. That’s to be expected, but O’Neal seems like the most embarrassing political figure of the 1960s that I know of barring maybe William Calley. This film is a bit meandering and long in tooth, but the acting from LaKeith Stanfield (O’Neal) and Daniel Kaluuya (Hampton) is strong enough to overcome the weaknesses. Recommended, though you could watch Selma afterwards so that you don’t feel like drowning the entire human race.

Nocturnal Animals: Amy Adams lives life as a pretentious, empty art-gallery owner who panders to rich people, and then receives a novel from her ex-husband Jake Gyllenhaal, who tells a fictional story about trying to hunt down a redneck (Aaron Taylor Johnson, the guy who played John Lennon all those years ago…and who is now one hundred percent unrecognizable) who kidnapped and killed his wife and daughter in rural Texas because he was a weakling. The ending to this is sort of intriguing in its open-endedness, but I’ll level with you, I only watched it because a Reddit thread I was reading about “what’s the scariest scene you’ve ever seen in a movie?” or something like that mentioned the abduction scene, so I just HAD to see it. It’s watchable enough, I s’pose, but evaporates a bit afterwards. The director, Tom Ford, apparently comes from the world of fashion, but I don’t think you’d really know it from watching the film.

12 Angry Men: Hey, now we’re talking!! I already knew jury members aren’t supposed to do their own investigations into a crime, so when Henry Fonda pulled out that knife to make his point I knew that in real life a mistrial would probably have been declared right then and there, and Sonia Sotomayor apparently thought so too....but the rest of this works really well in spite of that bit of fiction. Great use of its lone set and camera angles, a strong screenplay that spends just about enough time with each juror, a good sense of tension, lots and lots to discuss afterwards, good character actors filling out the cast, a sweet 96 minute length, morals that stand the test of time (even though if it were a real case, the kid probably would have been the murderer!) May it stay in IMDb’s silly Top 10 forever!!

ALBUMS:

Frank Zappa, Baby Snakes: A 1983 soundtrack to a 1979 film of a 1977 concert, I found a CD of this for $5 in a used-music place (yes, they still exist) and compulsively bought it. “Disco Boy” has a decent chorus hook, which about does it for the music on this album; Zappa has an all-star lineup as usual, but the lengthier stuff here just does little to nothing for me. Much of the rest of this is basically sketch comedy, with Zappa conversing with drummer Terry Bozzio, who “plays” Satan by imitating what sounds like either a homeless black beatnik or that big talking plant from Little Shop Of Horrors; subject matter includes Zappa claiming he has seen hell because he was signed to Warner Brothers for “eight fuckin’ years!!” (mild chuckle), and Bozzio possibly having a crush on some young male rock star guy but insisting “I!!! AIN’T!!! QUEER!!!—I!!! AIN’T!!! GAY!!!!”–yeah, about as edgy as some godawful dated Comic Relief bit, or maybe Gallagher. I’m not into “Dinah Moe Humm,” either, so what I did was give this to my older brother for Christmas. Haven’t heard from him yet, but I hope he likes it, because I didn’t.

Aerosmith, Rock In A Hard Place: New guitarists replacing the band’s old heroes? Who? Where? New decade? What’s that?!? All I’m hearing is a seventh 1970s Aerosmith album, with maybe a couple of synth textures in one or two songs to “get with the times.” I mean, I suppose Whosit and Can’trememberhisname aren’t Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, but I also suppose that I’m only a passing Aerosmith fan and don’t really consider Perry and Whitford all that distinctive to begin with. I’d figure good songwriting could make up for the loss of guitar heroes, but they didn’t come up with many good songs–“Jailbait” has some uptempo edge to it, “Joanie’s Butterfly” managed a trifle of amusing weirdness and “Push Comes To Shove” is a half memorable album closer, but that’s about it. That said, since I’m not an Aerosmith worshipper, I also couldn’t muster any hate for the album–sure, it was their weakest to date, but by virtue of just being another 70s Aerosmith album, it’s not some godawful failed Casio keyboard experiment or some hacked-out dinosaur album, like, say, Blue Oyster Cult’s The Revolution By Night. I imagine I’ll hate the big corporate sell out albums far more.

Beck, Midnite Vultures: This late-90s funk update/Prince homage/hipster dance-fest isn’t really my genre…but I guess I really am a big Beck fan by now, because I really liked it anyway (his other albums that I’ve liked for years were all in genres that I would have had an easy time getting into.) I liked the silly “Peaches & Cream” and “Hollywood Freaks” the best, followed by…well hell, most of it, but “Mixed Bizness,” “Beautiful Way,” “Debra,” “Milk & Honey,” “Broken Train,” “Pressure Zone,” “Get Real Paid”....er, I guess I wasn’t that big into “Sexx Laws” or “Nicotine & Gravy,” but I don’t recall hating them, either. Reading reviews of this album was a big waste of time–I’m sure critics had intelligent things to say about Beck doing a “big dumb fun party album,” but who cares, I’ve forgotten it all already. A very good album! Do you like it?!?

Beck, Guero: Hell, this might be even better–the remarkable thing about this is that it’s basically a slightly older and wiser version of Odelay…and if any of you remember this, I actually never cared much for Odelay, finding it far too hipster-y and smug and stylistically not to my tastes. So imagine my surprise that I happily bopped along to effortlessly-crafted postmodern bloop-blop like “Qué Onda Guero” (with a riff that sounds like a car horn) and “Hell Yes” in ways that, say, “Where It’s At” could never do for me in a million years (and God knows how I could explain that), or waved my head around to the rising hook of “Earthquake Weather” (the best song here), or stared in sadness at the bleak-yet-major-key slow hook of “Broken Drum.” I’ll not bother with most other song titles since it’s solid pretty much all the way through–I even sort of liked “E-Pro,” a song I recall seeing the video for back in 2005 and finding it annoying then, but not now. This became Beck’s highest charting album ever, but strangely, digging up all the Metacritic blurbs revealed that reviewers, even those that acclaimed Guero, did so with a resigned sigh that seemed to signal a sort of “beginning of the end” for Beck’s days as a critics’ darling, sort of like Sky Blue Sky did for Wilco–“yeah, this is a really good album, but it’s the first time ever that he didn’t do a brand new genre with each disc, so let’s all start writing the Beck epitaph, people”…aggghh. He does an “older” version of the album when he became a superstar, and it’s “the beginning of the end.” Fugg. Well, I for one think it vies with the aforementioned Vultures as his fourth best album, and I’ve had 15 years now to listen to the three I considered his best (Sea Change, Mellow Gold, Mutations), so…

Black Sabbath, Headless Cross: Just boring dated 80s metal, totally forgettable all the way through except for “the heeead-less crawwwwwwwssssss!” Just about every review for this I could find made it out to be absolutely terrible, and I suppose I would rank it lower than Seventh Star and The Eternal Idol, but it wasn’t even funny-bad, just a faceless bore with generic guitars and 80s-metal vocals and a once great band’s name slapped on top of it.

Black Sabbath, T Y R: “The Lawmaker” is actually pretty good. It’s uptempo, and that got my attention, because it means I’d have to say that this was therefore a better album than the previous one. My opinion was confirmed when Prindle’s review, which was about two lines long, said “Did you notice track 2 is the only good song here?” The rest of this is, of course, completely forgettable; I found myself more interested in learning that the “Y” in the title is actually a rune representing a “Z” sound. I don’t know how people even write multi-paragraph reviews of albums like this. Oh, one other thing: the band continued the tradition, all the way through these terrible later albums, of including completely bland, forgettable, silly, trite little instrumental bits on their albums, just like they were doing back in the days of “Embryo” and “FX.” What for?!?

Crosby, Stills & Nash, Live It Up: This fits into one of the saddest categories any album can end up in: it’s a badly produced late 80s (1990, to be accurate, but it’s splitting hairs) diniosaur album by a 1960s act that was basically torn to shreds by reviewers and fans alike, but that’s only when people bother to hear it to begin with, which few do these days. Oh, and it has stupid cover art (hot dogs on the moon with little construction guys doing work on them.) So yeah, this would seem to belong right next to such luminaries as the Kinks’ UK Jive, Jethro Tull’s Rock Island or maybe that Jefferson Airplane reunion album…but if you’re willing to put up with the requisite godawful Casio keys, synth bass and gated-reverb drums, there honestly are about four or five decent melodies that the guys were able to salvage with their vocal harmonies. Yeah, sure, “rockers” like “Live It Up” and “Yours And Mine” sound like old men trying to be The Outfield, and then there’s soft stuff like “Tomboy,” “If Anybody Had A Heart” and the political “After The Dolphin”, total adult contemporary mush, right?....well, no, actually I kind of liked the songs I listed. I swear to God, this is NOT their low point, or even all that bad of an album. In fact, I already know that one of the next two albums they did after this is worse…

David Bowie, Hours…: Pretty middling stuff; the only general critics’ line here is that this is where Bowie, age 52, was now “officially” an “old man,” as he dumped the 90s industrial/dance/jungle/soundtrack stuff he’d been trying to do something that seems somewhat informed by soft, pleasant…”adult contemporary,” I suppose, but it’s not like he turned into Phil Collins, he’s just getting older and slower. “Something In The Air,” the best song, might only be the “best song” because I know it from American Psycho and Memento, both of which used it in the closing credits, but it does have a fairly strong melodramatic hook, doesn’t it? I sort of liked “Survive,” “Thursday’s Child” and “The Dreamers,” but much of the other half just went in one air and out the other–not painfully boring, but not terribly good in any way either. If I have one thing to say about this album’s style it’s that Reeves Gabrels, whom I wasn’t terribly enamored with amongst Bowie’s many amazing guitarists in the first place, had a bag of tricks that was starting to wear very thin. By 1999 he was coming across like an annoying second-rate imitation of Adrian Belew, throwing in loads and loads of “wwzzhhhnaaaaaAAAAng!” type wank-noises and other junk all over the place, like if someone thought every song on an album needed a “The Great Curve”-type guitar solo in it. Unsurprisingly, this was his last collaboration with Bowie, and he went off to join…uh, The Cure, actually?!? Huh.

David Bowie, Reality: Anyone who knows anything about my opinions of David “Booeeeee” knows that I got into him because of Heathen about twenty years ago, a once-acclaimed “comeback” album that only I seemed to really care for amongst Babblers at the time (and it’s probably worse now, because opinions on that album definitely cooled.) I still love Heathen, but am only now getting around to hearing the follow-up he did a year later, which is....well, mostly more of the same, a slightly non-descript, midtempo “old-man classic-rock Bowie” sound that, for reasons I can’t really defend, worked wonders on Heathen, and is decidedly average here. “New Killer Star” is a pretty good start, with its blaring “I got a better way!” hook that makes Bowie sound not-so-old at all. Elsewhere, the best songs were the few weird experiments to be had: Bowie tries a gloomy Goth-creep piano ballad on “The Loneliest Guy,” which he most certainly isn’t, but he successfully lied to me, probably thanks to Mike Garson, who is also star of “Bring Me The Disco King,” which is like seven minutes of street background music from The French Connection, but I like that movie anyway. “Fly” is Bowie ripping off the “Whip It” riff, but he makes it sound like the Kinks’ “Come Dancing,” only louder. The best song is actually a cover, George Harrison’s “Try Some, Buy Some” with Bowie getting this magnificent rising glitter hook; too bad Bowie had to revert to his traditional habit of destroying his covers by ruining the Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso,” and, worse, slapping fake synths all over “Waterloo Sunset.” Most of the rest is midtempo, four-four, inoffensive, and painlessly forgettable, but I’m willing to bump this up one point or so because of the good stuff.